Over the last few months, several of my friends have had some rather unkind words for the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I couldn’t see why they were so upset. I mean, teenage girls were reading! And not just reading, but swarming bookstores to get their hands on these 600-page monsters as quickly as possible. Could I really disapprove of that?

Yes. Yes I could.

The series tells the story of Bella Swan, a barely-defined teen cipher who moves to a small town in Washington and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a boy in her class who turns out to be a 100-odd-year-old vampire. And that’s… basically it. I mean, the author tries to sandwich a plot into each of the four books – the first concerns a rival group of vampires who come to town and stir shit up for no discernable reason – but for the most part, they’re just very long, flowery explanations of how wonderful it is to be hopelessly infatuated with a vampire.

Seriously, go read the plot summary of the first novel. Somehow, Meyer managed to stretch that out to over 500 pages. How, you wonder, did she work such magic? Simple: by padding out the text with endless swooning over the sheer prettiness of Edward Cullen (in a perfectly chaste way, of course). But so what, right? It’s a supernatural love story for teenagers, and teenagers are stupid and overdramatic when it comes to love*.

Well, it’d be great if it was that simple, but no. Instead, like Homer Simpson before her, Bella just gets dumber and dumber as the series progresses. The second book, New Moon relies entirely on an Idiot Plot, which the legendary Turkey City Lexicon defines thusly:

Idiot Plot

A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)

Seriously, at one point, Edward finds out Bella’s dad is at a funeral. Instead of asking, you know, who actually died, he just assumes it was Bella and runs off to kill himself. And vampires (in this universe, anyway) are tough to kill. He has to go to fucking Italy to do it.

Let me drag this out a little more: Edward goes through all the trouble of traveling to Italy and meeting with some kind of vampiric Dr. Kevorkian, but never once stops and says, “Maybe I should’ve asked some follow-up questions about that funeral.”

And stupid protagonists aren’t even the worst part. No, that honor is reserved for the books’ romantic view of abusive relationships. Yeah, vampires? Apparently they’re very, very bad boyfriends. To call Edward jealous and controlling would be a tremendous disservice to all the jealous, controlling men who, though assholes, have never actually gnawed a fetus out of a woman’s abdomen. Seriously, that shit happens in the fourth book.

It’s not just the torso-nibbling (hey, even the best of us have our moments of weakness and/or bellybutton fetishism). Edward is the very model of an emotionally abusive boyfriend. He forbids Bella from seeing her friend Jacob because he’s a werewolf** — and probably because he’s a male as well, which makes him a threat to Edward’s dominance. He berates Bella, sends her away or walks out on her, and then comes back and apologizes and promises that things will be better from now on. Bella’s primary character traits are low self-esteem and hopeless devotion to this douchebag, to the point that she’s willing to become a vampire, leave her old life behind, get married at 18, and squeeze out a vampire-child that nearly kills her.

That brings me to another problem with these books: Stephenie Meyer doesn’t know shit about vampires, or how to write about them. Every vampire story uses a different set of “rules” for their undead characters. Can they go out in sunlight? Can they be driven off with garlic? Can they eat people-food, or are they on an all-blood diet? And so forth. Most authors try to select rules that provide a nice balance between the traditional vampire myths and the demands of the story they’re telling.

Meyer, not so much. She seems to have given some thought to how they avoid killing people (they subsist on animal blood), but beyond that her vampires’ powers seem limited to handsomeness and teen-soap-style brooding. As Bella’s pregnancy suggests, they can have babies, and those babies grow up into adult vampires. Which is to say, her vampires age. You know, just like people who fucking aren’t vampires.

Also, Stephenie, you aren’t supposed to turn your lead character into a vampire. When you do that, your story crosses the line between “forbidden love” and “together-forever bullshit wish fulfillment.” And then, just to make sure everybody gets their happy ending, you made Jacob the werewolf fall in love with a baby. Sure, he’s gonna wait until she’s 18, but dude. Dude.

Plus there’s a bunch of anti-abortion shit in the last book, which I’m not even gonna touch because my head is already close to exploding. Point is, millions of teenage girls (and their moms) are going crazy for these books. They’re falling in love with the controlling, womb-chomping vampire. They’re envying his dead-eyed, dependent human girlfriend. And most of all, they’re wishing they could have a love as pure and wonderful as Edward and Bella’s.

Now the first book has been turned into a movie, starring Cedric Diggory and Some Chick, and the die-hard fans are already gearing up for multiple viewings. If it makes enough money, sequels will become inevitable, and Harry Potter’s martyred friend will be forced to act like an abusive dick in front of everyone. I hope he enjoys acting off-Broadway, because he’s gonna need to do a lot of that to get his reputation back.

*“How can you break up with me? You said we’d be in love forever! You even wrote it on your binder!”

**Of course there are werewolves!